Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites
github.com
github.com
Non paywalled news outlets will be clickbait - they are 100% dependent on advertising revenue and need to get clicks. Paywalled sites generally aren't.
There's about 4 or 5 I would like to check
As I recall it was a pay-per-article model (around 25 cents per article looks like) and it had a number of publications to choose from. Though I haven't used it lately, I like the idea.
Now there is no such thing as a free look. No one has a paper they already read to share. I'm all for paying for subscriptions but that alone does not bring the balance the world once had. Just try to figure out what say the LA Times will charge you after the 'introductory period' - and they won't tell you up front that you have to call to cancel and that the call will take like 30 minutes while they try to retain your business (after jacking up the price by many times after the intro period). And you probably cannot choose the length of your subscription, subscriptions now go on in perpetuity until you complete the onerous cancellation process. I have no love for the way modern news charges for its product and treats its customers. You can blame the internet and cheap people but that isn't the whole story.
You shouldn't have to deal with both
On the other hand, they didn't have invasive tracking of modern websites.
I can understand justifying ad-blocking, arguing that you don't want to see it. So even though you're depriving them of revenue while consuming the product funded by it, there's at least an argument that you're only controlling what you see.
But using tricks to get access to something not available to you without paying? This seems akin to sneaking into a movie theatre.
This isn't the equivalent of avoiding looking at something (your choice), it's the equivalent of breaking into a private business and pinching the products without paying.
(Cue the usual argument about IP, tangibles vs intangibles, and various dismissive remarks arising from cognitive dissonance)
It’s up to you whether to pay attention to the ads, but outright blocking them is exactly the same as blocking the “please subscribe” wall.
Not "it is better", but "you'd be insane not to".
Secondly, I've never ever heard of a case where the site showing the malvertisements offered any sort of compensation to their victims. If that's how sites like to see the ads, all profits to them and zero responsibility, I see absolutely zero problems with adblocking.
But using a tool to get past a paywall is different. The show is not on TV, it is more like a rental without ads - and this tool is used to pick the lock to the rental store and then take all the rentals you want without paying.
I guess I agree that blocking the ads is worse than averting your gaze, actually. It prevents the producer ever getting revenue. But at least that's a risk they knowingly take with that funding model - paywall aversion is clearly not.
...yet!
The difference is that you need to actively mute your TV every time! You're probably not going to do it for every commercial break, and even if you do, you'll likely catch at least a bit of the first ad. It's really that first ad's fault for not grabbing your attention quickly enough while it had the chance.
Put another way, the advertiser is paying for ad space, and it's the advertiser's responsibility to use that space in a way which catches your attention. Whether the advertiser succeeds or fails is nobody else's problem. An adblocker, however, completely removes the ad space.
Does TIVO skip automatically, though? I know that when Dish tried to do that in 2015, the TV networks sued. Don't remember who won, but I'd personally be somewhat sympathetic to the TV networks.
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It's not about you. Websites are selling a product for a price; you're jumping the turnstile and saying it's okay because the fare was too high anyway. By all means, don't visit websites with overly intrusive ads, let the the price and demand curves even themselves out.
Or, if you do block ads—because I get it, the world is imperfect—at least acknowledge that what you're doing isn't entirely ethical or fair, and stop encouraging others to do the same.
This is usually a topic I try to avoid on HN because it feels like such a loosing battle, but somehow I walked into this one. :)
Similarly, I avoid looking at the advertisements bundled in my USPS mail (which are often advertising subscriptions).
How the info is rendered isn't really important to my claim - that it is fully intended to be restricted unless you pay, and you wouldn't be able to see it without employing this trick.
The trick is expressly designed to get you around a "paywall".
This is retroactive justification for sneaking past the security guard when he's looking the other way, and helping yourself to the products without paying. It's just fancy theft.
(By contrast, not looking at mail advertising is just averting your gaze, and ad-blocking is reasonably comparable. But using a tool to get past a locked door is not analogous at all.)
The practice discussed here is more like the scam where they forcibly put a "good" in hands of a prospect, saying it's a gift, and then demanding a payment.
It is theft, plain and simple. Someone makes something, owns the property, they have the right to determine under what conditions they sell it. I always find it hilarious how people defend piracy with arguments about making products more user friendly/cheaper and so on.
If you don't like something, don't buy it. If you're bypassing payment without the owners permission, you're stealing.
Bypassing a HTML element is not 'stealing', its reformatting remote data. They are sending the article in the reply to the request, and messing with the formatting. If they did not want you to read the full text, they would not allow an unauthenticated users to access the text.
I always find it hilarious how the strong IP bullies like to reinforce the status quo, empowering the powerful and cursing the weak.
Property rights in particular protect small and independent creators who rely on the fact that people pay for their products. Large studious can generally eat the losses of piracy, independent developers cannot.
This is why today they're forced to either two things. Build proprietary products that make theft impossible, or live on donations and capture only a fraction of they value they produce.
Everything else is coercion. I do not subscribe to your flavor of authoritarian strong IP.
The publisher didn't pay them in order to give it away for free.
If you start using digital lockpicks to pick their digital lock, and consume their content without paying, they have lost the revenue haven't they?
(Cue "they're not entitled to revenue for intangible goods", and other libertarian arguments that are internally cohesive but not accepted by the public)
Same thing with Movies and music. I made a huge offline collection worth 2-3TBs before I just had to throw it all away because everything was available on spotify, Netflix, Disney+Hotstar, Amazon Prime. Their services are top-notch and most importantly affordable.
I think something similar must be done to the online article/news market to make people want to pay them for easier and affordable access. Until then I will use every extension the internet has to provide to read any article I wanna read.
https://www.gamesradar.com/au/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-servi...
I subscribed to the New York Times once and it's nearly impossible to cancel. You have to call up a phone line and from memory, it takes ages. Given that, I would never subscribe again, even though I've considered it.
As such, I "pirate" New York Times articles because the service sucked, not because the price was an issue.
And the add-on embeds Google Analytics.
I wonder if some of those ad-hoc setTimeout(removeModal, 500) could be made more robust by looking for modals with MutationObserver. That way you can remove things the second they activate instead of letting them flash / hoping they exist once your timeout fires.
Broadly speaking these workarounds are for websites that sometimes show you the full story (i.e. based on a cookie or your referer).
I use this, and it's great. I recommend using uBlock Origin as well to remove ads on these sites.
Stealing does not apply to digital goods. You cannot deprive anyone of something infinitely replicable. You can only prevent those that you do not deem worthy to access it. and that attitude makes a person a bad person.
People lose their jobs because they are digital content creators and the attitude is that paying for intellectual property is uncool.
If there is another term you'd like to use for "looks like theft, but the original owner loses nothing" then feel free. But it is not theft or stealing, those require also depriving the rightful owner of the stolen property.
If I could duplicate the exact contents of your car, would it still be "stealing" if I did so? Reminder that you would continue to be in possession of 100% of the contents of your car. Maybe with regards to any digital data on any duplicated devices, I could see a bit of the "stealing" logic, then again nothing was actually "stolen" from you if you still have 100% of your original property, but I now also have duplicates of that property.
With a digital goods, we can eliminate the paper and plastic. It's a great thing! But for some reason, we've also decided to write the artist out of the equation too. At least if you're a pirate.
If you're a software engineer, you're being paid not to manufacture hard goods but to create something of intellectual value that could be technically be duplicated forever. What's the difference between pirating music and stealing code that is under a software license?
If by "stealing code" you mean creating and distributing (probably selling) software derived from it that violates the license, it is quite different.
If what you mean is simply downloading warez for your own use, it is more or less the same.
Stealing for personal use may be a more minor thing, but it still boggles me that people want to consume the fruits of others' labor without compensating them in anyway, as if creators are slaves who exist only to please.
But I will note that you are (by using the framing of "stealing") implying that piracy results in lost sales, which is largely not the case, except possibly for the most popular works. See "Piracy is Progressive Taxation":
https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...
In all cases, the price paid by the user is split in proportion which clearly shows that saying that "pirating" means stealing money from authors is utterly false. I have nothing against paying for books the amount really passed to authors plus some additional fair amount based on the true cost of distribution (eg. printing and transport or electronic storing and transfer) plus a modest profit. However, it is not the case nowadays.
Similarly, I would accept payments for articles in a model where the price for a good article wouldn't cover the costs of many worthless ones. The current model - subscription - is attempting to hide real costs of production of articles of very different value under average price forcing readers to purchase wholesale products. Why should one pay for "fillers" the same money as for good content?
For better or for worse, subscriptions are king in 2022, and I don’t see a meta-subscription for news being a good thing for journalism itself. Personally, I prefer something closer to the iTunes model, but that’s dead. I’m growing entirely sick of singular platforms that hold all the cards of entirely industries (and they don’t pay any better than the publishers do).
Your car example is not a good analogy. Once you notice people stealing, you would make sure the door is locked. Just like these websites can restrict the content server-side.
At the end of the day you are stealing and looting not just from the company, but the everyday people who work for that company, who are just trying to make a living for themselves and their families, and no rationalization will change that.
And to the car analogy: Let's say I was stolen from, but I'm so lazy I still can't be bothered to lock my car. Or I leave it open for some other reason. This has zero effect on the morality of the thief stealing from my car. It just means I'm an easy target for stealing. Two completely separate things.
They didn't provide access to just another customer or Google -- they send the article text to EVERYONE in the HTML response. They are thus making that text publicly available. If they want to make content only available to certain individuals, that is literally what paywalls and authentication/authorization are for.
Instead, they want Google to index the site AS IF the content is publicly available but then use javascript to restrict that content from users client-side on a case by case basis. The golden rule of authorization is never rely on client-side authorization as by then you've already willingly given the data/information to the client.
And the client has no obligation to not look at that information/data. They didn't do anything nefarious to get it -- you literally gave it to them.
> Would you rather publishers give google private direct feeds to index?
Absolutely I would. If we could enhance the indexing and search engine system so that (a) I could tell google which services I subscribe to and (b) google knows which articles are behind paywalls, then we could have a world in which we could intentionally filter To or Away from paywall content.
I know that I would often filter TO paywall content, especially if: - I could also tell google to avoid content farm content via a filter or content full of ads (not in their interests currently but it might become so as more of us get frustrated with shittier and shittier search results) - If google could surface the price to access each article on the search results (wherein articles on sites I already pay/subscribe to would be free and articles on sites with individual pay per access would be transparent and upfront).
I'm having a hard time envisioning a scenario where giving Google exclusive data will be in any way good for content creators and site owners in the long term.
If we took it a step further and gave google private direct feeds from publishers, would you then be OK with the automatic moat around Google's services that would then be built? How about the one that formed from the private subscription data that you needed to feed to them for them to tailor their searches to your preferences? What if they started charging for search? Would you then go to another search engine that did not have the private content feeds and could not, by design, find those relevant paywalled results?
edit: Just to reiterate, I'm not defending the paywall practice (or breaking it, for that matter). I just see this practice pushing paywalls to be hard rather than soft.
If you put something in the public sphere, it is public. Simple as that. You have no right to turn your intention of how I "ought" to consume your product into forcing me to do so if you have given me your product for free.
Use a paywall, Use proper authorization.
I solely use firefox for getting around paywalls. I have it automatically clear all cookies upon exit. That way any website that gives a few free articles per month will always be free for me.
From an economics perspective, they are trying to using old school pricing tricks (e.g. bundling, price discrimination, variable unit pricing to enable 2 article users == free, 10 articles == paid) as a tool for managing their customer funnel. But the golden rule of price discrimination is it only works if you can actually prevent your customers from engaging in arbitrage and can keep them in their bucket. A store can have a policy like "limit 1 per customer" but that doesn't prevent me from getting 100 of my friends from buying the thing. If I want to clear my cookies and look like some anonymous new customer each time, there is absolutely nothing illegal OR immoral about that. That's capitalism and they have designed a pricing model that can be gamed.
Sure, and if there's urban chaos, there's nothing preventing me from looting a store. Or sneaking stuff in my backpack. It's still stealing.
As to your example about the art, it's more like if one piece of art is in the window, but the rest of the gallery you can only see if you buy the ticket. But there's a door in the alley you can sneak in to and nobody will notice. So you sneak in the back, avoid paying the price, and get to see the whole thing for free. That doesn't sit right with me ethically.
Obviously that’s not how it should be implemented and that‘s also not what google suggests you to do as a publisher. Instead you should verify that the bot is actually google https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
I will not pay $50/yr for 20 different news sites. It's absurd. Who do these people think they are?
I'm glad projects like this are being created. It addresses.a boneheaded, outmoded industry that won't meet consumers where they actually are.
These sorts of "news piracy" apps will force change for the good of all parties. But they need one more piece to really take off: social P2P sharing. Strip articles of ads, share them in a p2p protocol (which could also develop interest graph capabilities), add voting, maybe comments, and definitely include the article's pictures.
1 - it would be fantastic as a reader
2 - the entire news industry that is stuck in 1995 would be forced to adopt to a Spotify model or adopt the microtransactions that have been promised since the 90's.
I would love to subscribe to a single source for all news. I'd pay a hefty fee. I'd also be happy to pay $0.10 an article. (I'd learn to avoid sites that shill clickbait, too.)
This whole industry sucks for readers. I support anything that gets them to adapt to change and become more consumer friendly.
And in reality, there are far more than 20 websites that have interesting paywalled content.
I agree they may be pursuing a suboptimal strategy somehow. Not sure I would call it "absurd". Having 100k individuals producing music on Spotify might be great, but I'm not sure what the implications would be for getting my news that way. But if someone wants to start "Spotify for News", I'm interested. Not sure that NYT needs their paywalls worked around in order for that to happen though.
It's not that different from using archive.is etc Imo. Hacker news isn't usable without this anymore.
Edit: Found it. It's still against their rules. <https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...>
My philosophy has always been: Pay for things if you are able, it's convenient, and pricing is fair. And if piracy is easier than paying, piracy always wins.
It's the reason I buy all my video games now and rarely pirate music anymore, but half of my TV and movies come through my seedbox.
It's about being able to consume media on my own terms. Thanks to piracy, I can get the same quality content from another source and enjoy it however I want, on any device, online or offline.
Seems to happen to every generation.
In fact, I generally don't even go to a site if there is a modal popup that makes me accept cookies (occasionally I have if I'm curious enough) and I have literally never signed up, even if free, to get access to an article.
Bypassing paywalls lets me pay what articles are worth to me to continue to browse them.
I do pay for an article aggregation service (academic articles), and I do pay for substack newsletters (although this is in part to support work I think is good even if I wouldn't pay for every article).
I love this extension. It works very well. I use it to browse 20-30 different sites a month. It would cost hundreds of dollars to individually subscribe to each publication.
You want people to pay for everything? Go "disrupt" the industry and create a spotify for news.
> We will then begin the hybrid pilot in full on May 23, with people coming to the office three days a week — on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday — and working flexibly on Wednesday and Friday if you wish.
It removes the popup elements that cover the page and other little tricks.
The common key thing across all of them, though - the server is sending the content, and then a little JS payload that creates the popup asking you to pay.
It's not a particularly good way of protecting the content of the article, for obvious reasons.
paywall-container__1UgCE
I thought this would check for the article on archive.org or something.
1) the price is too high for the content I consume. Often I will read a single article from a single well known publisher a couple times a month to a couple times a year.
2) I don’t know if I will find the content valuable until after I have read it. Headlines haven’t been of too much help especially lately where some quality content is under click-baity headlines; though sometimes the opposite is true or more often click-bait headlines do accurately reflect the quality of the content.
3) There is a lot of friction to pay even if the price did match my consumption model. And in addition to friction I have concerns with how my personal information might be used or resold; Creating an addressable audience via first party data is a tactic being pushed by advertisers and marketers.
So while I do agree with your evaluation I think the problem is a bit more nuanced (or maybe I’m just the minority).
Some have suggested a “spotify for news” which checks many of the above boxes but creates its own privacy concerns, may incentivize low quality content in the way ads do, add walled garden concerns, and may introduce fair compensation concerns.
An “open” solution, as hand wavy as that sounds, seems closer to ideal but as has been demonstrated time and again may not be competitive enough to “closed” solutions where winner takes all is in effect.
Just some thoughts.
I get that you have to make money somehow but if you put out 1 thing I'm interested in per year its not worth a subscription for me.
The flip side is that Spider-Man: No Way Home cost $200 Million to make. Sony didn't invest a fifth of a billion dollars into making this movie for the fun of it. They did it because they expect return on their investment.
I appreciate living in a world in which high quality content (news, novels, TV shows, ...) exists. High quality content requires a good deal of investment. And that is not going to happen if said content cannot be monetized.
[1] https://screenrant.com/spiderman-cost-budget-box-office-succ...
You don't get to put content out on the open internet and then cry foul when its accessed. These orgs are talking out of both sides of their mouth.
of course, it involves partership with a lot of different news outlets, but if it takes off, nobody would want to be left out of it... (rss/atom format? :) )
if anyone is interrested to start this, get in touch with me.
personally, I pay lemonde.fr and that's it, I read al-jazeera a lot for free too, I should pay...
How will that work?
It’s very ironic that this is a tech forum, much of which is software and this view is prevalent among some here
However I am not convinced people don't want to pay for digital goods. Many digital goods can be accessed through piracy, like music or TV shows, but people still pay for Spotify and Netflix. Steam still makes a ton of money selling digital games despite rampant piracy. These businesses provide some value beyond the content itself, and perhaps the more successful media/news outlets will have to discover what that is for them.
Kill or be killed.
YC founders, Fortune 500 devs, and FAANG engineers:
1. pirate all kinds of shit (Sublime Text, FLAC songs, movies)
2. Improve their company’s software to prevent pirating and/or licensing detection
Not everyone on Earth is a saint.
Seems like a new extension for this pops up every few months until the content publishers get savvy to the latest workaround and someone else finds a new method.
Originally these would just set the referrer to a search engine regardless of where the link came from and the paywall would go away, I'm not sure how exactly they fixed that but I believe that eventually stopped working.
Seems to be a bit of a cat and mouse game at this point.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/bill-gates-foundation-phi...
Something not a lot of people think about a lot is that having a billion dollars is so wildly greater in scale than being a simple multi-millionaire. You have to have 999 million dollars before you have your first billion.
If I make $100k, and I buy a banana for $1, that would be like if someone making $1 million bought a banana for $10. For a billionaire, that would be a $10,000 banana. That means if you're Elon Musk, my yearly salary is like half a banana.
What I'm ultimately getting at is that, to be a billionaire, you have to hoard wealth away from other people in a dramatic way.
These philanthropic organizations are packed with money obtained from customers, and I think it's important to remember where they got that money in the first place, and what alternative activities that money would have engaged in if it wasn't hoarded in the first place.
E.g., how much money does my city have to pay Microsoft for Windows licenses that could have gone toward education, health, and infrastructure? How much less would Windows licenses cost if Microsoft had never been a monopoly and had serious competitors?
Why would it be so? Wealth is not a zero sum game.
Natural resources are the root of where all wealth comes from, even services like software. You can follow the chain all the way down: a human types some code in a computer, which was made out of metals and minerals mined from the earth. Oil is used to power the machinery that mines those metals, and the human typing out the code eats food grown in farms and fished from oceans.
There is quite literally a finite amount of wealth to go around, and billionaires keep an extreme amount of that wealth for themselves. When they build a $50 million mansion using bookmatched marble and burn insane amounts of oil for their $200 million yachts, they're taking resources that could have been used by someone else, and those resources are not renewable.
When you look at the most wealthy nations per capita, they all have one thing in common: natural resources, especially oil and gas.
Let's say it's 1999 and I'm a worker and I make $50,000 a year. I bought a new computer that comes with Microsoft Windows 98, and $50-100 of my purchase went directly to Microsoft for the license. Would that price have been lower if there were more alternatives available on the market, if Microsoft software wasn't a baseline requirement for conducting digital business for most companies and individuals?
We actually know the answer to that question, because eventually the Microsoft OS monopoly was broken, and now we see that the most popular operating systems (Linux for servers and Android for smartphones) are provided for free or very little cost, and they even include their source code.
That license money I gave Microsoft is a natural resource I'll never get back.
Having most of your wealth in your companies stock is not equivalent to the $10k banana. Its probably more like the $500 banana and a big stack of toilet paper.
Absolute dollar value of wealth is a trick of the misinformed socialists like to play because they want to redistribute. Once things get into the tens of millions of dollars its no longer about absolute value, its cost of capital, leverage, interest rates and liquidity.
I'm just using the analogy to show just how much more wealthy a billionaire is than a millionaire. For example, millionaires on TV news or playing football for your favorite NFL teams are like minimum wage employees when you consider their relative wealth compared to the owners of those organizations.
The point of the analogy is to show just how much the wealthiest of the wealthy really are, to show that these oligarchs are powerful on the level of a state, on the level of millions of regular people.
You used the boogeyman word, "socialists." In my opinion, capitalist education teaches us to fear "wealth redistribution," but it's not even really about wealth redistribution. It's about excess wealth inequality prevention.
When a small group of people become wildly more wealthy than everyone else, even more wildly wealthy than major business owners and CEOs, they become unelected oligarchs that control the state.
So, if your main argument is "socialism bad," I'd encourage you to think of it more along the lines of wealth and power inequality. I think oligarchs want to distort this message and make it sound like "socialists" are trying to force everyone to make the exact same wage, or increase taxes on regular people, or enact a "nanny state."
Not a lot of people want to end capitalism entirely, they just don't want there to be people out there who are so wealthy and powerful that they can control governments without being fairly and freely elected. They want a relatively level playing field where the best ideas win, not the ideas that come from the people with outsized influence.
Just because he has whitewashed his bio doesn't mean he is a good guy
Maybe normal human beings should pay enough that newspapers can survive.
I agree in principle, but I struggle to see what business model can allow newspapers to survive in the digital era.
If you don’t have newspapers, who are you becoming “well-informed” from? Journalists do the work of combing over government press releases, financial data, sourcing, interviews with relevant parties, etc. If they aren’t doing this, who is? The thing is, all of the more partisan news outlets whether Fox or Jacobin, get their base facts somewhere and if it is not their own reporters doing the grunt work, they are sourcing the actual base “facts” from the reporters you don’t seem to recognize.
I’m tired of the “good news is worth paying for” argument. I don’t disagree with that idea, but I think it’s time for a lot of the mainstream news organizations that people suggest I pay for to die. They had their time, things have changed, and they are failing to adapt. Let’s try something new.
If they truly are bad you need a site blocker, not a paywall bypasser.
Trying something new would be starting up a news org, not coding a paywall bypasser.
People should just admit that they are cheap.
/rant
I vowed never to pay for a news subscription again. Big mistake.
If the only way these ailing news orgs* can survive is by being manipulative jerks to people trying to stop paying them, then let them burn.
* Neither the Economist nor the Times is ailing
Answer: <click>
I called their support asking if this is a known type of ad that they do for paying subscribers. It seemed like a bug, so thought they'd want to dig into it. They told me that this is indeed a thing they do, and that I am not exempt from autoplaying unstoppable audio ads just because I pay. I told them to double check, since otherwise I'd be canceling, and they confirmed that it's a thing, so I canceled. (I'm 50% sure the support person just didn't know what I was saying. Maybe my ad blocker was being screwy somehow.)
Outside of that, I find the coverage to be pretty neutral or maybe center-left, but definitely factual and not outrage baiting. WSJ is even more neutral, but I find that WaPo has better politics coverage (while WSJ has better business coverage). NYT is similar to WaPo, but IMO a little less neutral with the way its headlines are written. NYT is still a great paper though.
Yes, there have also been major factual blunders, but for the vast majority of information they seem to genuinely try and deliver vetted facts.
Ironically the real solution to this is more ads, but people will block that too lol
Edit: Explanation - the "I subscribe to the NYT" as a pat response to funding news sources puts far too much power in the NYT's hands, and they've proven to be less than trustworthy in the past.
In defense of the NYT, vetting sources is hard and they publish a whole lot of good content.
Has the NYT changed anything concretely since then? Because going by the way they still seem completely addicted to "anonymous sources in the intelligence community" it sure doesn't seem like they have learnt their lesson.
The vast majority of the reporting from NYT is good, and I don't rely on them exclusively. They're just the only written news source I pay for.
The truth is the NYT is a heavily biased, establishment bootlicking far-left progressivism propogating propaganda machine. They will do whatever it takes to present the opposing view as racist, supremacist, sexist, anti-semetic, anti-gay, and bigoted, while anything far worse but on "their side" is handled with kid gloves. Trump sneezed? Well that's racist, plus he wants you to drink bleach, literally, so we're going to cover that heavily for the next week. Something bad happened? It's Actually Trump's Fault. Here's Why. Trump was totally going to destroy America, except, well, that didn't actually happen, at all, but they're still trying to push that narrative.
Biden bungled Afghanistan, gas prices and inflation is through the roof, Putin invaded Ukraine under his watch, Biden very prematurely declared "independence from the virus" a year ago (!!!), Biden flip flops almost as much as Trump, has more deaths under his belt from COVID than Trump... everything is swept under the rug, a passing mention in all but the most egregious examples, and even then they treat him gently. I recently read an opinion column from a long-standing columnist there basically telling us how we should all support Biden because he just, like, has a really tough job, you know, and would you even wish such an important and consequential job on your worst enemy?
The NYT needs help for sure, but not financially, unfortunately.
In theory public media like PBS and NPR should address the gap, but those organizations tend to depend on donations from the wealthy, so their coverage skews towards their interests and conversational style.
I think the government should provide newspaper subscription vouchers to the poor.
Public transit is clearly the best kind of theft! /s
I ran into a lot of articles on HN which are behind a pay wall (I use this extension), but were not deeply interesting, therefore I left after one or two paragraphs. I can't imagine how much money I would've spent on nothing if I'd pay for every article I click on.
Also, I believe the news outlets have a similar problem like video stream providers: too much fragmentation. When I'm forced to subscribe to prime for a specific movie, then to netflix for another movie, then to disney for ANOTHER movie, I'll eventually end up just pirating them all.
I figure most people on this site can afford to subscribe to a news source or two and probably should.
You want to pay $50/yr [1] for twenty different news websites? All I want to do is read one article.
It needs a Spotify / Netflix model. Or the promise of micropayments that never happened. (Yeah, I'll pay 10 cents for an article. And also learn to distrust your site if you shill clickbait.)
[1] NYT digital cost
Micropayments have not worked because major news outlets won't use them. Technically it's a solved problem. See Coil for example:
For example, getting your users to give their money to a third party that then might come back to you isn't better than getting paid directly—it's even more friction and you're giving all the power away to a third party.
The user experience isn't necessarily better either. I still have to open my wallet and start a recurring billing subscription, but with this weird Coil site instead of just this one service that I want.
And then there's a chicken-egg problem of no sites using Coil, so no money in Coil, so no value for the user, thus no value for the content creator. Just like every micropayment attempt before Coil.
As engineers we like to think that everything is a technical problem. But the technical implementation of a micropayment solution is 0.0001% of the work.
Obviously if you just want this one service you can subscribe to it. No need to use something like Coil.
> And then there's a chicken-egg problem
Yeah absolutely. I had a Coil subscription for a couple of months and ended up canceling it because IMGUR was the only site that had an integration with it.
But what I know 100% is I won't pay a subscription to the NYT, The Economist, or any other news outlet to read 1-2 article per week at the most.
Streaming video, not so much anymore.
* Pay per article incentivizes click-bait trash.
* Subscriptions soloed content, incentivize anger as a service, fearmongering, and addictive practices.
* Ads incentivize both.
The ideal news source for the reader is one designed to minimize its use.
For most people id guess a YouTube habit provides short term value in terms of entertainment but reading a quality paper habit provides long term value to the individual and society in terms of being informed.